Texans have always had a reverence for water, perhaps because we live on the edge of where it’s abundant and where it is not. In this 110-year-old photo, Roy Brown rows with friends on the Guadalupe River in Kerrville. The Guadalupe flows 230 miles from western Kerr County to San Antonio Bay and has attracted human habitation for at least 5,000 years. “My great-uncle Roy was my grandmother Gussie May Brown’s older brother,” explains Leakey resident Jan Powell Wilkinson, who shared the photo. “His grandfather Joshua D. Brown was the first settler of Kerrville. Joshua moved from Kentucky in 1831.” The circumstances of this photo have been lost, but Wilkinson says Roy graduated from Kerrville’s Tivy High School the following year and moved to California, where he lived the rest of his life.
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